Account suspended.

Not just the campaign, which is as implied on their help pages, the usual, but the entire account.

So I haven’t been able to log in to let my patrons know what’s going on, to offer alternative options for how to get last week’s chapter and the upcoming chapter for this week.

I can’t even get a list of current patrons to email, which is extremely distressing.

Although, frankly, with the daily migraines from stress, I don’t know that there is going to be a chapter this week.

If the identification verification process goes badly, then they will delete my entire account and I will lose all I’ve worked over on this platform for the last eight or more years.

It’s fine.

It’s just …Twitter burning, but worse.

What happened:

For some reason, they needed me to verify my identity with a government issued ID. That reason was undisclosed and apparently I don’t get to know why.

It’s not because of adult content, because 1. I don’t do adult content 2. according to their help pages, there is the option of using non-government issued ID if it’s just a matter of “are you an adult”.

Claire sent the first email on the 24th.

I didn’t respond in a timely fashion because I had another bout of the plague, so Claire suspended my account on July 1st and informed me on July 2 that if I didn’t respond within 14 days they’d delete my entire account and “refund my patrons”.

I found out on July 5th when I tried logging in to upload my latest chapter.

Promptly sent Claire an email.

Then proceeded to send a few more emails.

When there was no response, I opened a new support ticket on Saturday, was informed via an automatic response of their business hours, and that it could be 24-48 hours before they’d get around to me.

…which, I personally think if you’re in the business of dealing with other people’s money, then perhaps you should have more reasonable hours and response times.

Still no response this Monday so I opened yet another support ticket, and finally got another Stripe verification link from Claire this morning.

I don’t know how well or fast the verification process will go.

My last experience with Chase where there was a “send, fail, resend” loop for about 12 times until a very kind customer service representative finally got things through isn’t filling me with optimism.

Nor my current experience with Venmo where the issue is still unresolved, after a lot of back and forth and literally weeks, but at least in their case I wish they’d delete the account so I could stop worrying entirely about whether someone is trying to hack into my account.

I also don’t know that I can or wish to continue with Patreon.

It would not be the best financial move because I am grandfathered in on the lower fee, plus I don’t know if my patrons would be amenable to shifting to another platform or method.

I have been struggling to sort things out for the last six days and I haven’t gotten very far.

Because migraines.

I cannot overstate how hard it is to think when it literally hurts to think.

From what I remember, and my faulty brain could be wrong here, is that it’s different when you post fiction on a gatekept platform versus on Wattpad or on your own blog.

“First publication rights” or something along those lines.

I don’t know that I should be worried about this aspect as much, because I don’t have the energy to go querying and the chances of being scooped up by an agent off Wattpad is …hahahaha.

But I am vaguely concerned of the website scrapers who either use it to feed things like ChatGPT or of those who bundle stories they like off Wattpad and sell it on Amazon as their own.

I was briefly looking at Ghost and Buttondown and similar things, but as with Ko-Fi, I’d have to pay upfront to have the “paid subscription” option and whereas it’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things (9USD/month), it’s not something I really want to have to worry about.

I’ve settled on three possible options:

Moving to Kindle Vella and updating serially. This might be the easiest option, to be honest, but then I’d really have all my eggs in the Amazon basket and if I’m concerned over Patreon being an abusive partner, welp. Amazon is like Actually Evil.

Moving to Buttondown since the first 100 subs are free and possibly linking to Ko-Fi or Zelle at the end of each “chapter”. With this, since just the first 100 subs are free, I feel like I’d have to be on top of analytics and whether people are opening the emails and then angsting over whether to unsub the people who aren’t opening the emails. Plus the fairly in-your-face finance links.
It’s super uncomfortable on all levels and I dislike.

Doing a 14 day test of Ghost and keeping the membership if I manage to get enough subs to cover the monthly cost.
The downside would be vague stressing every month if it’s going to be an income or a tax deduction item.

It’s all messy enough that I might just stick with Patreon until the ship entirely sinks, I don’t know.

But I don’t think Patreon has the benefits of creators at heart, if they ever did. I feel like they don’t respect the fact that they hold the livelihoods of people, many of who might be vulnerable, in their hands. I don’t think they respect the energy, love, and work that goes into an account there.

“Business as usual” when it comes to work that creators have labored on and entire communities… I know that’s the norm for capitalism on the ‘net, but I don’t feel safe there, essentially.